Flesh for Frankenstein, the 1973 erotic horror film that brought the actor Udo Kier an early taste of fame, was presented in 3D, the better to make its ingeniously disgusting effects truly pop. The gory highlight showed Kier, as Baron Frankenstein, being run through with a spear, his liver wobbling jauntily in the viewer’s face.
No such gimmicks were needed to render Kier vividly three-dimensional over the course of a career that spanned more than half a century, and during which he worked with everyone from Lars von Trier and Rainer Werner Fassbinder to Pamela Anderson and Madonna.
He combined the wounded menace of Peter Lorre, the contemptuous mania of Klaus Kinski and the sexual magnetism of Terence Stamp. Much of his power was distilled in that penetrating gaze. His were the sort of eyes that not only followed you around the room but pursued you out of the cinema, down the street, all the way home and into your dreams – or your nightmares.
Kier, who has died aged 81, moved easily between malevolence and camp flippancy. Blending into the background, though, was not within his powers. “I want to act in a way that people remember,” he said. “Otherwise, what’s the point?” In 2015, Interview magazine called him “the ultimate cult film actor of his generation”.
That publication was cofounded by Andy Warhol, producer of Flesh for Frankenstein and its follow-up, Blood for Dracula (1974), in which Kier again played the title role. He also appeared in several works by Fassbinder, including The Third Generation (1978), a study of a terrorist cell, and Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), a 15-hour TV mini-series set during the Weimar era.
Actor and director had known one another since frequenting the same colourful blue-collar bar in Cologne as teenagers, and briefly lived together in the early 1980s.
It was not until the 90s that Kier began to acquire cachet. The catalyst was his fleeting but unforgettable appearance in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991). He played the purring, preening businessman who brings two male sex workers (River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves) to his hotel room. There, he performs an atmospherically camp nightclub act, his face lit from below by an oversized lamp. A sex scene between the three actors is inventively shot as a series of mock freeze-frames.
That film, his first in the US, gave Kier membership of the Screen Actors Guild and brought him to the attention of Madonna. She used him in 1992 as one of the stars of her glossily explicit coffee-table book Sex, alongside the likes of the supermodel Naomi Campbell, the rapper Vanilla Ice and the porn star Joey Stefano. He was also in the videos for her singles Erotica and Deeper and Deeper.
Kier had begun working with Von Trier in the late 80s, but as that director’s profile increased, so too did his. He played the bug-eyed, fully-grown demon to whom a woman gives birth in the climax of Von Trier’s television horror series The Kingdom (1994), which was released in cinemas in the UK, and one of the pitiless sailors who kills the disturbed protagonist (Emily Watson) of Breaking the Waves (1996). Among Kier’s later films for that director was the apocalyptic Melancholia (2011), in which he was a prissy wedding planner. He was also godfather to Von Trier’s son.
Rare was the arthouse auteur who could resist Kier’s eccentric presence. For Walerian Borowczyk, he played Jack the Ripper in Lulu (1980) and Dr Jekyll in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Lady Osbourne (1981). He was in Wim Wenders’s The End of Violence (1997), Werner Herzog’s Invincible (2001) and My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? (2009) and Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room (2015).
Kleber Mendonça Filho cast him in Bacarau (2019) as a violent mercenary who ends up being buried alive, and as a Holocaust survivor in the award-winning political thriller The Secret Agent (2025), set during the Brazilian military dictatorship.
Kier seemed just as happy to appear in Hollywood product such as the Jim Carrey comedy Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), in which he was a billionaire collector of exotic animals, the futuristic Anderson romp Barb Wire (1997), the star-studded adventure Armageddon, the vampire comic-book adaptation Blade (both 1998) and the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle End of Days (1999).
He was born in Cologne, where he and his mother, Thekla Kierspe, only narrowly survived the bombing of the maternity hospital by the Allied forces. She raised him alone; he never met his father, who was already married with three children when he was born. “I had such a horrible childhood,” he said. “We had no hot water until I was 17.”
Schooling was erratic. He took a factory job, saved money and moved in 1965 to London, where he studied English. It was there that he was spotted by the director Michael Sarne, who cast him as a gigolo in the 1966 short Road to St Tropez despite Kier’s protestations that he had no idea how to perform. Encouraged by the attention he received, he stuck to acting, and played a witch-hunter in Mark of the Devil (1970).
He happened to meet the director Paul Morrissey on a flight, and was cast by him in the two Warhol horror pictures. Blood for Dracula was made so quickly after Flesh for Frankenstein that Kier was given only a week to lose the requisite weight to play the Count. He subsisted on nothing but water and salad leaves, and was so weak by the time shooting began that he was consigned to a wheelchair.
Later films included an adaptation of the erotic novel Story of O (1975), Monika Treut’s Seduction: The Cruel Woman (1985), the cyberpunk thriller Johnny Mnemonic (1995), which reunited him with Reeves, and Shadow of the Vampire (2000), in which Kier played Albin Grau, producer and production designer of FW Murnau’s Nosferatu. In Cigarette Burns, John Carpenter’s 2005 episode of the Masters of Horror anthology series, Kier is seen feeding his own intestines into a film projector.
He also co-starred with Matt Damon in Alexander Payne’s science-fiction comedy Downsizing (2017) and with Mel Gibson in the thriller Dragged Across Concrete (2018).
He won a Teddy award at the Berlin film festival in 2015 for his contribution to queer cinema. In Swan Song (2022), he played a retired hairdresser who travels to the funeral of a former client to style her hair and make-up ready for her open casket. It was a welcome leading role for a figure who had spent most of his life jump-starting movies rather than driving them. He rose to the task splendidly, and looked delightful in an ensemble which included fedoras, neckerchiefs and a fetching mint-green pantsuit.
It was after making My Own Private Idaho that Kier had put down roots in the US, where he remained for the rest of his life. He collected modern art and furniture, and divided his time between two properties in Palm Springs – a converted modernist library and a ranch – where he lived with his dog Liza, his giant tortoise Hans, and a plastic horse called Max Von Sydow.
He is survived by his partner, the artist Delbert McBride.
• Udo Kier (Udo Kierspe), actor, born 14 October 1944; died 23 November 2025
